madou | Lorenzo & his humble friends

Tea for the Tillerman

In less than four months of flat sharing, Mindo converted me to the art of having tea together at least twice every day.

Screen shot 2013-07-17 at 3.48.08 PM

Now that I am back in Italy and Mindo moved to a new flat in Porte de Hal I started digging a bit into Tuareg culture. Not much, really, but enough to find out that you should never just drink a tea: it is so much better to have a tea. There are three conditions to have a tea: time, fire, friends. Additionally, it is important to drink always three cups: the first bitter as life, the second sweet as love, the third suave as death. But, as I wrote at the beginning of the post, we were drinking just two cups a day. Also, we did not have a fire and we barely had time. It was still good.

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July 4, 2013

Overwhelmed

Mindo, Ana, Roberto, Giulia, Matic, Vaida, Xavier, Moe, that are those with whom I have spent the last 24 hours: I will carry your generosity with me.

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July 3, 2013

Who said we lived in Brussels?

Mirano is a dodgy club just in front of our house in Brussels. Mindo and I will forever remember the unique style of Mirano clients queuing in front of the gates on Saturday nights. A few days ago I realized with astonishment that one of the few music albums I bought was recorded just there. The name of the album is, in fact, Live in Mirano – I reckon I could, in fact, have made the connection a bit earlier on time. It is one of the four albums recorded by the Belgian alternative rock band Ghinzu that I discovered in Ireland in 2009 and kept on listening since then.

Talking about nice/funny discoveries, Giulia showed me a series of 12 episodes on life in the Eurobubble which is available on YouTube.

The title pretty much speaks for itself. This is a nice farewell video to conclude my experience here in Brussels. But if I have to speak about Belgium, then there’s more. Like most of the people, I knew very few things about Belgium before I moved here. I knew they had beer, chocolate and were the home of the EU, but I certainly did not image this country is as crazy as it is. Just to say: Belgium has the highest density of roads and railroads in the world and because of the quantiy of lights, the Belgian highway system is the only man-made structure visible from the moon at night. If you are interested in this weird country, you should probably have a look at this clip Daniel showed me back in 2012.

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June 23, 2013

Brussels

The weather is still awful, but I finally admit I really like Brussels. Of course, the city is doomed because of all the problems I have mentioned in previous posts, but looking back at the last three months here I recognize at the end the good things far exceed the bad ones. I refer to the random indie events, the huge parks, the three official languages, the vintage clothes, the jazz concerts, the Turkish community, the Ethiopian bars. And, hey, living in the poorest part of town is actually not bad at all.

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June 23, 2013

Tanti maschi

Eppoi niente, un’altra bellissima settimana a Bruxelles con Stefania prima e tanti amici poi. E nonostante gli ultimi cinque ospiti in casa fosero tutte ragazze, in questa gallery solo maschi virili ed impegnati.